


Letters to Etta

by fairytalehearts



Category: Fringe
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-28
Updated: 2012-05-28
Packaged: 2017-11-06 04:09:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/414542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairytalehearts/pseuds/fairytalehearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Olivia starts writing emails to her daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters to Etta

**Author's Note:**

> Disc: I do not own Fringe and make no profit from this work of fiction
> 
> AN: I needed to write an Etta story. This is what popped into my head. Written Post 4x19 "Letters of Transit", obviously.

**_2013_ **

When she was a baby, her mother made a book documenting all of her important milestones. She didn’t know about it until she was away at boarding school, but she remembered her mother making a similar book when Rachel was a toddler.

The book was lost after they moved and while the idea was good, Olivia wanted something that would last. So she started writing stupid emails to her daughter. She’s sure that she could just tell her what was happening- someday in the future, maybe when she was sixteen or eighteen- old enough to appreciate it.

She wanted the sort of relationship with her daughter where they liked talking to each other about everything. But she supposed jotting down some talking points wouldn’t hurt.

_Your first word isn’t ‘Mama’ or ‘Dada’. It’s Walter._

Olivia almost regrets typing the words; maybe she should lie and say it was pickles or something equally abstract. Walter would lead to questions she couldn’t answer and there was only so much she could leave in an email without getting into classified information. Glancing down at the floor where Etta was currently talking to herself, she decides to be honest.

_All day, every day, you would say ‘Walter’…_

_**_

She was beyond exhausted.

They had finally gotten Etta to sleep through the night and now she was being crabby while they had to be up for three days straight. They were out of coffee and the case was almost closed and if she could just remember that her last name was now Bishop- they could finally go to sleep.

Peter was furiously scribbling his case notes, leaning over the coffee table. She honestly couldn’t remember how he got on the floor. Or why they were in the living room instead of their office. Etta was watching them work from her blanket at the opposite side of the living room. Her face kept getting more and more scrunched, she obviously disliked that they weren’t paying any attention to her.

“Does Bishop have one ‘I’ or two?” Olivia joked lamely, putting her pen down and waiting for Peter to finish. Her head hurt, her nose hurt from her glasses and she had already called in sick for tomorrow. She planned on cuddling with her daughter until passing her over to Peter to change her diaper at the proper time.

_The Perfect Day._

“It has one. How do you spell depolarizability?” He countered motioning to the furious red marks on the page he was reading. Apparently his assistant couldn’t spell it either.

“Walter.”

Etta should not be talking. Especially not the word ‘Walter’. Peter argues it’s the one word they both say more than anything else, phone calls, visits, case files. Their daughter was apparently receptive to everything they said. Her first word was Teddy. Because of a stuffed bear. Somehow she doubted a ten month old knew how to pronounce ‘Walter’.

Grabbing his phone out of his pocket, he turned the camcorder on and tried to goad their daughter into saying it again, “Come on, Ette. Say ‘Walter’ for Daddy.”

She tilts her head and stares at the phone, as if to say ‘why should I?’

“I’ll let you sleep in our room tonight.”

Olivia wanted to scold her husband for bribing their daughter that she couldn’t possibly understand. But she sits up, smiles and says “WALTER!” on cue. Peter emails the video to everyone in his contact book (including herself) and Etta giggles happily.

As promised, he let Etta sleep in their room, curled up on his chest.

Peter falls asleep the second his head hits the pillow, one arm curled around their daughter. The two of them blink at each other in the dark, and before Olivia knows it, it’s morning.

 “Morning, my little Etta.”

“Walter!”

That was the beginning of the end.

**

Etta says Walter everywhere. In the car. In the Fringe Division Day Care. At the Grocery Store.

She gets a certain type of…joy, at her annoying little habit, with a mischievous look that is so Peter, Olivia can hardly be mad at her. She even says it when they take her to Massive Dynamic for a checkup- while she’s getting shots. She screams “Walter” and cries.

Olivia has to grip the edge of the table to stop from going over there. Her baby is crying.  She needs her mother. Normally Peter would be here holding her back, but they had a case and one of them needed to be there.

Almost missing it, there’s a whisper in the back of her mind _‘Owwiee’_.

Confused, Olivia looks to her daughter and she stops screaming instantly. An odd look of understanding comes over her tiny face; somehow she realized that her thoughts were being heard. Her daughter was giving her a sign.

Etta thinks about everything: the weather, peas, Daddy, her hair, cars, bugs-

It’s like the weird movie from the 80s where babies talked. But only in her head. She doesn’t like the mailman and loves saying Walter just because it annoys Peter. Her little voice has opinions on everything and it was giving her a headache.

The nurse puts a bandaid on her arm and she insists on walking herself to the elevator. Crawls off the bench and heads for the door, while Olivia makes her apologies and barely remembers to grab her purse.

She wobbles but forces herself not to lean against the wall to walk.

“You’re not even a year old honey.” Olivia sighs, picking up her daughter and holding her close. “You have plenty of time to be an adult when I’m old and gray.”

**

Walter of course, is ecstatic at her choice of first word.

“Walter Walter!” Her chubby hands go out to be held and Walter obliges, “This is a sign of intelligence, my boy! Walter is not an easy word to say and she is enunciating it flawlessly!”

“Thanks Dad.” Peter mumbles sarcastically, kissing Etta on the head before heading back to his lab table.

Olivia doesn’t want her daughter to be a lab rat, but it can only go so long without telling Peter. They’re eating dinner, Etta happily shoving spaghetti in her mouth while thinking about kittens (not that she knew that they were called ‘kittens’ but they had been on Sesame Street the other day) and Peter makes a comment about her lack of crying lately.

Not able to make eye contact, she mumbles the words into her hand, “Etta’s psychic.”

Peter looks back and forth between the two of them, brow creasing.

“Walter?” Etta frowns, matching her father’s face. The two of them pouting at each other was pretty cute. Relying on Etta to diffuse tension wasn’t the best solution but it was the only one she had.

Peter crosses the room towards the kitchen and picks Etta up, studying her very carefully, “She doesn’t look psychic. If she was she’d know what I was thinking right now.”

He quickly tickles her and she screeches, “Daddeeeeeeeeeee.”

Satisfied, Peter motions towards her laptop, “Make sure you put down that her second word was ‘Daddy’.”

“You cheated!”

“So it was a competition?”

Olivia turns her nose up at him, but dutifully sends a second email.

_Your second word was ‘Daddy’._

**

**_2026_ **

Staring at the flash drive her father had been ambered with, Etta is at a loss for words. She doesn’t need the emails or the photo galleries- she can get the memories straight from her father’s brain. But it means everything that he kept it with him, for her. That meant he planned on coming back. Reading her mother’s words, she can picture her perched over her computer, glasses on her face.

“Your Mom and I- liked to keep things clean, I guess. But you knew better. You used to get as dirty as possible and then rub the mess off onto my white t-shirts. Or on my face. You would just laugh and laugh.”

His memories of her childhood are interwoven with memories of her mother, her smile, her laugh. It’s so easy to read him, but she can’t help but blink back tears whenever she does. He loved her mother so much, her not being here now was killing him.

“I used to read your mind a lot as a kid.” Etta says quietly, clicking through the hundreds of emails.  Videos. Her life before everything went wrong, “We’re very similar in a lot of ways, I suppose that’s why- I’ve always been good at science. Figuring stuff out.”

Peter- her father, smiles and puts a reassuring hand on her shoulder, “I’ll leave you alone with your Mom.”

She clicks on one of the videos which she knows is a mistake.

It’s her third birthday and her little face has been covered in chocolate cake while the other, more well-behaved toddlers looked on in shock.

_“Etta, honey, we talked about sharing your cake with your friends.”_ Her mother is beautiful and kind and gently dabs the frosting off her face. Little Etta is more concerned with licking the frosting off her face, but obediently allows her mother to get the frosting out of her hair.

_“They can put their face in too if they want! It’s fun.”_

_Walter dips his face in before her father can stop him. Her mother turns to the camera and addresses her father, “Peter.”_

_He sets the camera down and walks around the kitchen table,_ _“What Liv? It’s cake. It’s her birthday. Let her enjoy it.”_

Etta’s not sure she can handle reading all of the emails. In a fit of self-pity, she turns off the ancient computer and storms into her father’s room. “I don’t want to read all of these emails. Let’s go get my mother back.”

  


  



End file.
